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However, when Trump won the election in a shocking upset, Obama still had some comforting words to say to his daughters.

“What I say to them is that people are complicated,” Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick.

“Societies and cultures are really complicated. … This is not mathematics; this is biology and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.

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“And you should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to vanquish. And it doesn’t stop. … You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.”

Obama told the New Yorker something about his own rise to power that, in retrospect, seems eerily similar to Trump’s ascent, reminding the magazine that he too was once an unlikely candidate finding success against Clinton.

“In ’08, they saw me coming, but I was a guy named Barack Hussein Obama coming up against the Clinton machine, so no way!” he said. “So they weren’t focused on me, and I established a connection.”

Obama also appeared to take a swipe at Trump’s supporters.

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“What I’m suggesting is that the lens through which people understand politics and politicians is extraordinarily powerful,” he said. “And Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on.”

Obama would not reveal exactly how he reacted when Trump pulled a shocking victory on election night, but he did say he didn’t start watching the returns until 10 p.m., in part because he doesn’t watch television until that time as a general rule.

First lady Michelle Obama, meanwhile, went to bed around 10 p.m. as usual because “she decided she didn’t need the stress,” the president said.